Mac Flecknoe, in full Mac Flecknoe; or, A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S., an extended verse satire by John Dryden, written in the mid-1670s and published anonymously and apparently without Dryden’s authority in 1682. It consists of a devastating attack on the Whig playwright Thomas Shadwell that has never been satisfactorily explained; Shadwell’s reputation has suffered ever since.

The basis of the satire, which represents Shadwell as a literary dunce, is the disagreement between him and Dryden over the quality of Ben Jonson’s wit. This comic lampoon was both the first English mock-heroic poem and the immediate ancestor of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.

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artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.

Aug. 9 [Aug. 19, New Style], 1631 Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, Eng. May 1 [May 12], 1700 London English poet, dramatist, and literary critic who so dominated the literary scene of his day that it came to be known as the Age of Dryden.